


wading in waist-high water

by unspuncreature



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/F, Panic Attacks, Rule 63, i'll sail this goddamn ship myself, seriously though where are the lesbian obikin fics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:09:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28140678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unspuncreature/pseuds/unspuncreature
Summary: oh mystic - am I foolish soul?oh listen - am I hard to hold?--obi-wan is injured.anakin has an existential crisis.the author attempts to write for the first time in three years.
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi/Anakin Skywalker
Comments: 11
Kudos: 83





	wading in waist-high water

"Thank you, Kix." Anakin doesn't recognize her own voice in the unspoken dismissal.

"Yessir."

Tight-lipped, Kix nods and ducks from the tent. The door flap wavers half-open, letting a long sliver of waning sunlight leak in.

The silence stretches languid as Anakin finally braces to look down at the sleeping woman breathing warmth against her hip, stomach tight. 

She's prepared to see the swelling, the dried blood, the bruises and bacta patches: every physical indication that Anakin wasn't good enough. 

Not good enough to sway the battle in time to reach Obi-Wan when she'd called, crackling through the com just as their bond roared to life in an instant across the battlefield. The honest desperation flooded Anakin's senses like freezing water, knocking the wind clean from her lungs. Not good enough to shield her from blow after blow when she'd /finally/ made it through the mud-soaked carnage to her former master's side. 

Her brow furrows as she watches her own failure behind her eyelids over and over, watches the breath being punched from Obi-Wan's lungs, watches her master sink to her knees slowly and then hit the ground all at once, arms splayed, blood pooling dark and thick beneath her.

No.

Her master is here. Unconscious and battered, but here. Alive. Patched up and made whole once again by well-trained men. /Their/ men. Anakin scarcely met their eyes as Obi-Wan was gingerly lifted from her arms into the transport, unable to face the emotions she was certain she'd find if she looked. She heard but did not see the rush of armored bodies swarm their general, unhinged worry no doubt etched onto their faces as they clamored to stabilize her with the limited medical supplies aboard the LAAT. Anakin heard Kix's voice giving orders through a com as though she were underwater, felt the kick of the ship as if it were a parsec away as dust and muck and debris flung up beneath its belly. The ground disappeared as the sky swallowed them up.

But it's fine, now. It's fine.

She's ready to take all of this and tuck it away neatly. Pack it into the quiet recesses of her mind, where she could deal with it later, on her own terms. Laying into her katas until she couldn't think, sweat stinging her eyes and muscles screaming hot and tight, or ripping the plating from her arm, parts strewn about her quarters, until she was one quarter bare pistons and wiring and framing, slowly replacing each piece with the precision of hundreds of hours of practice. Breaking herself down in ways she could control. Putting herself back together in the only ways she knew how. Later.

Now, finally, Anakin turns to Obi-Wan and chokes on air.

She is halfway curled on her uninjured side, a waxing moon around where Anakin's weight dips the cot. She is both worn beyond her years and impossibly young in her sleep. Vulnerable beyond the innocence of undisturbed rest. Her hair is spilled out around her face, out of her neat low plait, unkempt in a way Anakin has never seen. The sun spills the cycle's last milky-gold rays across both their bodies, rising and falling in tandem with careful half breaths. Dried blood cakes the hair at Obi-Wan's temple, streaking down into her ear. Anakin's flesh hand twitches with the urge to tuck away the strands of hair that have strayed across her master's cheek to her open mouth, but stops herself, fist clenched.

Something like sickness bubbles deep in Anakin's gut. She has held Obi-Wan's hair back in the 'fresher as she vomited up poison (intended for her Padawan) to the point of exhaustion. She's sparred with her to the point of failure more times than she can count. She's been hugged by her a few times over the years, each time finding her as surprised as the last, frozen in place, unable to fully hug her back. Anakin has even done her kriffing laundry as punishment, grounded for sneaking out to a drag race on the lower levels. (She was only spectating, really, but she flushed furiously all the same as she quickly folded her master's standard issue underayers as if they weren't exactly the same as her own.)

This is more intimate than almost anything she's experienced before, and Obi-Wan isn't even awake to permit it. Who is she to take this when Obi-Wan has already given so much? Given her youth to train a prophecy incarnate. Given her trust and loyalty time and time again in defense of every blunder to the Council. Nearly given her life, multiple times, to spare Anakin just a few more moments.

It's too much. Disgusted with herself, feeling raw and cracked at the seams, she flicks her gaze down to her hands, palms up, dry and cracked, spattered with blood. Trained to defend and protect, yet all they did was take. The heat of the setting sun is stifling in the quiet of the tent, but Anakin can't bring herself to move. She can't stand to take another thing from her master, even if it was only a few more minutes of fitful rest. 

She fidgets minutely and casts her gaze back to her former master, unmoving save for the shallow rise and fall of her chest. Dried blood stains her long sleeved underlayer from the bacta-covered wound on her neck, blooming into a half-puddle near her ribcage, where the shirt ends in tatters. It must have been torn away in the rush to close the wound and stabilize her. Anakin blinks and sees Obi-Wan nearly gutted in front of her all over again, hand clutching her stomach as blood plops wet onto-

No. There is none of that now, neatly stitched skin peeking puckered and pink from beneath the bacta patch, too small to cover the seam of skin fully. Anakin knows it will heal in time, falling into place among the countless scars that already litter Obi-Wan's body. She didn't need to see them to know they were there.

The soft light hairs on the newly mangled skin of Obi-Wan's belly flicker gold for the briefest moment, catching the sun's last song as it dips lazy below the horizon. 

Obi-Wan winces suddenly in her sleep, her hands grasping at nothing, but doesnt't wake. Panicked and jolted, Anakin checks her shields once, twice to be sure. Her heart might as well pummel through her ribcage and jump out of her chest, the heat coloring her cheeks only adding to her shame. She wants to slam her face hard into the nearest flat surface. There isn't one. Distantly, she hears their men setting up camp for the night, the familiar crackle of fire and laughter ringing hollow in her ears. For the first time in her life, she wishes Rex would come running with an urgent look and her beeping comlink, forgotten in the mayhem. She wishes Ahsoka were here, grounding her in her responsibility to her Padawan, grounding her with only a single sympathetic glance from a friend. /Takes and takes. Selfish fool./

Anakin is painfully alone with herself. Her treacherous heart and her Obi-Wan.

This secret moment isn't hers to keep. She needs to stop. She needs to get up, get back to reason, back to strategizing their push forward into the next sector come morning. Maybe, she thinks ruefully, she needs to throw herself back into that muddy trench and never crawl back out.

Anakin sighs, heat licking up the back of her arms, her cheeks, her spine. She inhales, nudges back against her own durasteel shields once more from the inside, and dazedly watches dust motes swirl around the ghost of her sleeping master's breath.

She doesn't stop herself now, greedy gaze dragging curious down the strong length of her master's legs, bare below the standard issue underlayer shorts, miraculously free of blood and dirt. It's as if the force itself had the last laugh when it spun Obi-Wan together. So soft beneath her war-hardened exterior in little ways only Anakin knows: the cup of her palm on Anakin's shoulder in silent reassurance, the purse of her lips over a steaming cup of tea, the way her small hand fits /just so/ against the shape of her chin while lost in thought, the soft crinkle of her eyes and that private smile that lit up every fiber of Anakin's being. Anakin realizes, suddenly, that Obi-Wan has fabricated this rough exterior. Imperceptibly and steadily she worked to live against her own nature from the day she cleaved Maul in two. Tried to be someone else for the sake of a little scrap of a girl from nowhere, someone she scarcely knew.

How much harder did her master have to toil to make up for where Anakin has always lacked? How much more danger did Obi-Wan put herself in out of obligation to her padawan? Obligation to protect, body thrown in front of hers enough times to make Anakin's stomach roll with layers of guilt. A fresh one rolls on thick and sticky for each life-saving parry, each time their backs pressed together in mirrored defensive stance, Obi-Wan catching every bolt intended for her padawan's heart with the steadfast length of her blade. 

Anakin needs to leave. Now. She's suffocating, she can't breathe, she can't /move/. Her fingers are numb, white knuckled, flesh hand gripping the cold edge of the cot. 

She's stolen something sacred today and yesterday and every day before. She's desecrated the only place she's known to call home since Tatooine and she didn't even /know/, couldn't see the damage she was doing by simply existing in a world that was never meant to be hers. /You take and you take and you take. Have you had enough yet?/

Qui-Gon should've left her to rot on that dust heap. If nothing else was different, at least she could've spared the Order. Could spare her mother, her master, and oh- Ahsoka.

She can't stop now, bile rising up her throat, betraying herself again and again at the fresh purple blooming wide on the inside of Obi-Wan's thigh, the sickly healing yellow on her shins, the soft arch of her insoles marked by hard lines mapping out days on her feet, days without sleep. Her stomach rolls itself over with guilt and something darker she can't name. She swallows without thinking, throat burning, eyes pricking and shut tight, heat flaming under her skin. The quiet rhythm of every puff of their shared breaths falters. Anakin's mouth parts, panting low in frozen panic, awash with terror. Her whole life was upended in the span of an hour of quandary and yet she sits, waiting for some cosmic intervention in the force to strike her down for her sins.

The bond flutters. The cot dips and creaks.

"Hello, Anakin."

"Obi-Wan."

"It would appear that I was outmatched."

Anakin forces her eyes open, forces her body to relax, but she still feels like a live wire, stripped and raw.

Obi-Wan's voice is still thick with sleep, a shaky hand reaching to ghost her fingers over the bacta patch on her neck as she rolls to fully face Anakin, wincing. "We should-"

Anakin finds something very interesting to look at on the canvas wall of the tent.

"I've got a squad covering the perimeter of this sector while we set up for the night," she waves the dismissal, voice blank, rising from the creaking cot with an unknown weight sloughing off of her. She knows something deep inside her had shattered just then. The shrapnel bit into every soft tissue in her body, settling deep and permanent in her heart.

"I suppose you expect me to stay here and be doted upon," she presses calmly, without any real bite or accusation. Anakin can hear her pushing herself up onto her elbows, hissing sharply in pain. Less than a minute into consciousness and already Anakin can feel Obi-Wan's shields rising and bolstering, exemplifying years of practice as she tests a safe tendril out across the bond. Selfishly, Anakin feels shut out, but makes no attempt to tug, shhtting herself back in just as tightly. /Takes and takes and takes./

Anakin doesn't answer her. She looks down at her hands, flexing her mechno-arm, turning her hand over, pulling her glove taut.

"You need rest," she asserts after a pause.

"I've just slept for... for nearly two hours, Anakin," she huffs, exasperation coloring her voice, barely above a whisper.

Anakin's back is to Obi-Wan now as she makes a step towards the firelight dancing just outside the tent.

"You're injured. You need to rest. I can handle this tonight. I'll fill you in come morning." Even to her own ears, Anakin sounds like she's pleading.

"And I suppose I don't have a say in the matter."

Anakin's heart lurches. Her unwilling body carries her to the door, pushes the flap aside, and turns back one last time, orange haloed silhouette flickering in the dark. /Selfish. Foolish.

"Goodnight, Master."

**Author's Note:**

> @unspuncreature on tumblr as well. criticism welcome, of course. this was written in one sitting without proper formatting i really just had to put it out in the universe before it clawed my heart out.


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